Martin Wehmer: In the Box There’s a Goat Eating Coloured Pants

Contemporary by Angela Li presents In the Box There’s a Goat Eating Coloured Pants, the second solo exhibition of Beijing-based German artist Martin Wehmer inHong Kong.

Wehmer’s thick oil paintings bear an abstract style while conveying simple and clearly represented subject matters. Wehmer has a profound understanding of painting as a genre, and fully embraces its restrictive properties. Wehmer sees his canvas as “a box that offers a whole array of different opportunities and possibilities”. His images are visualizations of the discourses among diverse ways of representations from our history and cultures, as well as the interactions he has with them.

Neither fully representative nor formally abstract, Wehmer’s style is a manipulation of the vast gray area between two ends of a wide spectrum. Nourished by German Expressionism and an admiration of German-born American abstract expressionist artist Hans Hoffman, Wehmer leaves the boldest of traces on the canvas with his palette knives. He draws inspiration from socially relevant goods and his almost fetishistic obsession with certain objects. His artworks are both deeply personal creations and flexible vessels that welcome viewers’ imagination. As Wehmer himself said, “[In the course of artistic creation,] there is always something you can’t control”, the viewers’ reception is merely one of them. Wehmer holds that “if you can accept this, you bring a message”.